THE GOOD THING about the present housing system is that it provides students with a choice of where they want to live, and determines who does and does not live where he wants by an impartial lottery system. Under such a choice system it is virtually impossible that everyone will end up living where he wants, but most people will get one of their top choices. And since the elimination of master's choice the disappointment inherent in the system has been spread in the fairest possible way.

The Yale plan is a bad idea because it eliminates that choice without changing the housing system at all. The reasoning behind it seems to be that if no one has a say in where he lives, then no one will be unhappy with his assignment--but this assumes that students' emotions haven't got much rational basis and that there is nothing inherent about the Houses that makes some different from others.

Some Houses are more popular than others, and that situation won't change under a forced-assignment plan; students are intelligent enough and free enough from the tyranny of peer pressure to realize that under a Yale plan differences between the Houses will be the same as they are now. It is inconceivable that the people who now complain about living at the Quad will, after being forced there at the beginning rather than the end of freshman year, be completely happy with it.

THE PROBLEMS, THEN, go deeper. The Quad is now far behind the River Houses in accommodations and far from the Square. It needs major refurbishing and a more efficient shuttle-bus system to bring it to parity with the River Houses. It is also important to preserve the Quad's one-to-one male-female ratio and its mixture of freshmen and upperclassmen--both options that, because they are out of the Harvard mainstream, the University has a particular obligation to preserve for students who want them. It is especially important that the Quad's one-to-one ratio be maintained until the ratio throughout the College is one-to-one. The Yale plan not only eliminates student choice in Houses, it also severely limits roommate choice and diversity of acquaintances by populating freshman entries with students assigned to the same House. The prospective roomate pool is effectively reduced to one-twelfth of the freshman class.

The key question is one of student choice. Because free choice is a positive good, and because alternatives exist which would alleviate discontent with housing choices, the Yale plan should not be adopted.